The Ballon d’Or or the Golden Ball is an annual football award by the French Football, and so far it is considered the most important award. It honors the football players that have the most outstanding performance throughout the previous year, based on the votes by the most trusted football journalists. 2018 marks the history of this award as the first female player got to receive the trophy.
However, we could not see the Brazilian star Neymar in this historical event. Perhaps foreseeing that he has no chance of winning the title, Newmar stayed at home and play Call of Duty instead.
For more details, he steamed the game online on video game platform Twitch and finished in 12th place in the list of best players, which was quite of a highlight for every professional gamer.
The awards were set up in Paris, exactly where Neymar lives as he is playing for The Paris Saint-Germain. It takes him 30 minutes to go to the ceremony, thus distance cannot be a proper explanation for his absence.
On the other hands, considering that it is the middle of the season and that everybody knows for sure he cannot win it, Neymar has the reason to refuse to go. Despite being on the shortlist of the 30 nominees, he did not have a successful year, both with his national team and his club. PSG was eliminated in the Round 16 in the Champions League and Brazil were defeated by Belguim in the Quarter Finals in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Messi and Ronaldo, who has duopoly won the title for a decade, knew that they can not win and refused to go either.
In the end, they were right. Luka Modrić from Croatia won the trophy, as Alan Hutton of Aston Villa scored his miracle goal against Birmingham City too late to change the votes of the journalists.
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